Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Basically, a little package of drink mix, a little water, and voila! Alcoholic lime-ade! Powdered alcohol has been sold as a "flavoring" in the US for a few years, but it looks like this bunch of Dutch science students have figured out how to powder the stuff and actually reconstitute the alcohol content.

Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.

"We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks," 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.

I'm a bit concerned that the targeted markets is "youth", because it's not technically illegal in the Netherlands to sell this sort of product to minors -- only alcohol in liquid form is covered under existing law. Of course, the legal drinking age in the Netherlands is already at a low 16 years old.

The whole "alcopop" set of products-- sweet, soda-like drinks with the same alocohol content as watery beer -- has been pretty popular in Europe, where drinking ages are lower and punishment for DUI are higher. Personally, the allure of a sweet, fizzy lime-ade-like drink is rather hard for me to figure out. Sounds kind of gross, actually.